(Finance) – Intesa Sanpaolo opens to the public from 27 June 2024 to 6 January 2025 at the Gallerie d’Italia – Turin the Antonio Biasiucci exhibition. Arca edited by Roberto Koch. Third chapter of the “La Grande Fotografia Italiana” project, started in 2022 with the Lisetta Carmi exhibition and continued in 2023 with Mimmo Jodice to pay homage to the great masters of twentieth-century photography in our country. The exhibition is organized under the patronage of the Piedmont Region and the City of Turin and represents one of the most important exhibitions dedicated to the photographer, covering a very broad period of his production.
Among the most interesting and innovative contemporary masters of our time, Antonio Biasiucci (Dragoni, 1961) has been pursuing for many years a practice that is inspired by an absolute version of language. A complex work, not simple but precise and punctual which simplifies, perhaps even strips down, the photographic gesture in a continuous renewal of forms in search of absolute symbols.
In this exhibition, with over 250 photographs exhibited, for the first time the different chapters of Biasiucci’s “utopian poem” are presented together: between powerful polyptychs, sequences of images, single works, the effort is to create a poetic and extended representation of the life of human beings, in a journey that touches on the profound themes of existence, the essential elements of living always starting from personal experience and, therefore, from the autobiographical elements that first formed the character and sensitivity of the artist himself.
Michele Coppola, Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historical Heritage of Intesa Sanpaolostates: “In the work of the Gallerie d’Italia, which recounts the different ways in which photography expresses content and beauty, an in-depth study of the great Italian masters is essential. It is dedicated to them the review curated by Roberto Koch which today reaches its third exhibition and brings to the city one of the most evocative interpreters of contemporary photography in our country, Antonio Biasiucci. In the coming months, alongside Mittermeier’s reportages, “Arca” will embellish the exhibition offer of the museum in Piazza San Carlo thanks to memorable installations by the Campanian artist. Once again the Gallerie d’Italia share an initiative of high artistic quality and cultural valuehelping to affirm Turin’s identity as the first Italian city of photography”.
Biasiucci’s research fits great ancestral themessuch as knowledge, the basis of nutrition or the starry sky. Thus, the volumes of the archive of the Bank of Naples that we find in the Codex series, become, decontextualized, architectural elements, bases for new, possible constructions. And the loaves of bread captured in the daily work of the hands appear as planets in the universe, meteorites that appear and disappear in the sky. But the artist also applies this same gaze to highly topical contents, such as the drama of migrants, which inspired the series The dream.
The deep black in which everything is often wrapped in Biasiucci’s photographs requires a particular effort from the viewer, that of let yourself be carried away by amazement to be able to experience and recognize the primordial flash, the source, the origin of life that we recognize in forms that reveal themselves to be dynamically transforming. Everything has to do with something essential, like the Ark which contains archetypes or like the pyramid, the utopian construction made up of many possible pieces, of an effort and of an absolute dream.
The project “The Great Italian Photography” provides that for each exhibition there will be the intervention of another artist. And so on the three monoliths that occupy the central space of the exhibition, among the loaves, the skulls and the casts of Biasiucci, here are the unexpected appearances of Mimmo Paladino. His primitive drawings, his numbers engraved in the black of the ink, in an intimate dialogue with the photographs, are imaginative forms and in their infinite and anonymous being they speak to us of the multiplicity of human beings.
Gallerie d’Italia – Turin offers to the public a different way of immersing yourself in the exhibition itinerary with the desire to innovate the visiting experience through the Gallerie d’Italia app: building shared imaginaries, changing the narrative register, broadening one’s point of view through listening to the artist’s voice, is an opportunity that comes offered to all people who visit the exhibition. Putting yourself virtually in direct dialogue with the author and his poetics opens up the magic of a story in which you listen and allows you to see more deeply.